Clinton Often Chides NCLB; Obama Open to Vouchers?

Throughout the presidential campaign,
the leading Democrats have
been speaking from a similar script on
education—until this month, when
U.S. Sen. Barack Obama
of Illinois suggested
that he could be persuaded
to support private
school vouchers.

“If there was any argument
for vouchers, it was ‘Let’s see if
the experiment works,’ ” Sen. Obama told the editorial board of the Milwaukee
Journal Sentinel on Feb. 13. “And if
it does, whatever my preconception,
you do what’s best for kids.”

That statement diverges from the
stance of U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton of New York, who rejected any
private-school-choice proposals in her interview with the same editors the
next day.

Although Sen. Obama’s campaign
has since downplayed his voucher
comments, the exchange suggests that the
two remaining Democratic contenders have
subtle but important differences in their approaches
to federal education policy, whether
the topic is expanding school choice, rewriting
the No Child Left Behind Act, or experimenting
with new forms of teacher pay.

Sen. Obama, for example, believes the first
step to fixing the NCLB law would be to ensure
it is adequately funded, according to his campaign Web site. He also
proposes changing the law’s
testing policies “to track student
progress to measure
readiness for college and the
workplace and improve student
learning in a timely, individualized manner.”

Sen. Clinton, meanwhile, suggests that
the law needs to be substantially rewritten
by improving the quality of tests and by
adding new measures to its accountability
system, such as graduation rates and scores
on formative assessments.

The differences may not appear big to the
typical voter, but they reflect the experiences of
two candidates who have both been involved in
education improvement efforts during their careers.

As first lady in Arkansas, Sen. Clinton
worked on education policy issues, helping
the state set educational standards and establish
a teacher qualifying exam in the
1980s, said Catherine Brown, the domestic-policy
adviser for the senator’s presidential
campaign. Sen. Clinton also worked on education
and social-welfare issues as a board
member of the Children’s Defense Fund, a
Washington-based advocacy group that lobbies
for child-welfare needs.

Sen. Obama had significant experience
working in Chicago in the 1990s as a grassroots
organizer and as the chairman of an effort
supporting community-based school reforms
financed by the Annenberg Foundation.

“They both bring a lot of knowledge to the
table,” said Cynthia G. Brown, the director of
education policy at the Center for American
Progress, a Washington think tank with links
to prominent Democrats. (She is not related to
Sen. Clinton’s domestic-policy adviser.)

And either candidate might be able to
highlight educational issues in the general-election
campaign to help attract bipartisan
support against U.S. Sen. John McCain of
Arizona, the likely Republican nominee. Although
Sen. McCain hasn’t outlined a detailed
education platform, he has called the
NCLB law a “good beginning” on the campaign
trail and has promoted private-school-voucher
plans during his 25 years in Congress.
("McCain Emphasizes School Choice, Accountability, But Lacks Specifics," Feb. 20, 2008.)

“I expect education will give [Sen. Obama
or Sen. Clinton] an opportunity to make important
statements on an issue that’s not
partisan,” said Ms. Brown of the Center for
American Progress.

Questions of Choice

In the lengthy presidential nominating
process, which reaches what may be a critical
day for the Democratic rivals in the Ohio and
Texas primaries next week, education hasn’t
been a front-burner issue for either party.

Although Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama have
proposed plans to expand access to preschool
and to reduce college costs, those plans haven’t
received much attention.

In televised debates early in the process,
the two of them and the other Democratic
hopefuls criticized the No Child Left Behind
law, which is one of President Bush’s top domestic
accomplishments. Sen. Clinton voted
for the law in 2001, before Mr. Obama was in
Congress. But the candidates’ proposals to
fix the law haven’t been widely discussed in
debates or in stump speeches.

While Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama differ
over how to fix the law, the biggest potential
difference on education emerged when the
issue of private school choice came up while
they campaigned before the Feb. 19 Wisconsin
primary.

School choice is a significant issue in the
state because Milwaukee is the site of the
longest-running publicly financed private-school-
voucher program in the nation.

In answering a question about his stand on
private school choice during his meeting with
editors of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
Sen. Obama started by saying that he was
skeptical about private school choice and
spent most of his time explaining why.

“My view has been that you are not going
to generate the supply of high-quality schools
to meet the demand,” he said, according to a
video posted on the newspaper’s Web site.
“Instead, what you’re going to get is a few
schools that cream the kids that are easiest
to teach,” leaving groups such as students in
special education in the public schools.

As he concluded his remarks, Sen.
Obama suggested, though, that he could
change his mind if a longitudinal study
demonstrated increases in student
achievement. The suggestion
was a notable departure
from the blanket opposition to
vouchers that is standard for
Democratic presidential candidates.

Such opposition is also a core position
for the nation’s teachers’
unions, which are closely allied
with the Democratic Party. Sen.
Clinton has been endorsed by the
1.3 million-member American Federation
of Teachers,
while its Illinois and
Chicago affiliates
have been working
for Sen. Obama.

In her meeting at the Milwaukee
newspaper the day after its
session with Sen. Obama, Sen.
Clinton didn’t waver in her opposition
to government support for
private school choice.

“I still have doubts about the constitutionality
of a voucher system,”
she told the newspaper’s editors.
The senator said that if a district
or state created a private-school-choice
program, it would be hard to
deny vouchers “to certain applicants
despite what might be very
serious concerns about [a private
school’s] curriculum or approach.”

As an example, she said that
voucher laws could permit public
money to be used to send a student
to a white supremacist’s
school or a “school of the jihad.”

In a 2002 decision, the U.S.
Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality
of the Cleveland
voucher program, which, like Milwaukee’s,
allows parents to use
the publicly funded tuition aid at
religious schools.

Some school choice advocates in
Wisconsin said they were heartened
by Sen. Obama’s comments.

“I was very pleased to see that
he was open to the evidence,” said
Susan Mitchell, the president of
School Choice Wisconsin, a Milwaukee-
based nonprofit that advocates
and performs outreach on
behalf of school choice programs,
and a political Independent. “I
thought it was quite refreshing
that he would say whatever is
best for the children is where I
would be. … We’re accustomed to
people saying ‘no way—no matter
what you tell me about how it
works, we’re not going there.’ ”

Later,
in a statement provided
to Education Week, Sen. Obama’s
campaign emphasized that the
senator’s comments to the Milwaukee
paper did not signal he
had changed his opposition to private
school choice.

“Senator Obama has always
been a critic of vouchers, and expressed
his long-standing skepticism
in that interview,” the statement
said. It added that the
candidate has always voted
against voucher proposals.

NCLB in Focus

While private school choice may
be part of the debate during the
presidential campaign, it’s unlikely
the issue would be a defining issue
for either Democrat if he or she
won the presidency. But the next
president is almost certain to play
a significant role in the future of
the No Child Left Behind law,
which Congress is working to reauthorize.
If Congress doesn’t complete
the reauthorization this year,
as many observers expect, the next
president would put his or her
stamp on the law’s revisions.

Both Sen. Clinton and Sen.
Obama have criticized the law as
requiring too much testing. Under
NCLB, the latest version of the Elementary
and Secondary Education
Act first adopted under President
Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, states
must test students in grades 3-8
and once in high school in reading
and mathematics.

In several campaign stops on behalf
of his wife, former President
Bill Clinton has called the law a
“train wreck” and placed some of
the blame for it on Sen. Edward
M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairman
of the Senate Health, Education,
Labor, and Pensions
Committee, who
made a high-profile
endorsement of Sen.
Obama late last month.

In a campaign stop in
Keene, N.H., late last
year, Sen. Clinton gave a
detailed explanation of
how she would change
the law’s testing requirements.

“It is treating everybody
as a little test-taker …
and a lot of the curriculum has
been eliminated in favor of teaching
to the tests,” she said, according
to a video that has been posted on
the YouTube Web site. Under the
law, tests should be changed to provide
“individualized accountability
based on how [individual] students
do,” she added.

Sen. Clinton also favors revising
the law to add new measures for
determining school success, such
as scores on Advanced Placement
tests, graduation rates, and the
results of formative assessments,
said Catherine Brown, her domestic-
policy adviser.

Sen. Obama has similar ideas to
improve assessments by basing accountability
decisions on individual
student progress and making test
results more useful to teachers.

He proposes to give states
money “to implement a broader
range of assessments that can
evaluate higher-order skills, including
students’ abilities to use
technology, conduct research, engage
in scientific investigation,
solve problems, [and] present and
defend their ideas,” according to a
fact sheet on educational issues
distributed by the campaign.
“These assessments will provide
immediate feedback … so that
teachers can begin improving student
learning right away.”

Merit Pay

Sen. Clinton and Sen. Obama
have made somewhat different
comments on teacher pay, but a
close examination of their proposals
suggests that both would
support extra pay for teachers
who take on additional responsibilities
within their schools. And
both say any proposals for alternative
forms of compensation
would have to be developed with
and supported by unions and
teachers.

In a speech to the NEA’s annual
convention in July, Sen. Obama appeared
to endorse the concept of
merit pay based on teachers’ effectiveness,
although he emphasized
rewards and said the pay would
not be tied to “an arbitrary test
score.”

A bill he introduced in 2006
would have created a pilot project
to evaluate teachers based in part
on the test scores of their students.

Under his campaign proposal,
teachers could earn extra pay for
learning new skills, such as earning
a degree in special education,
or taking on leadership roles, including
serving as mentors for new
teachers, said Linda Darling-Hammond,
an education professor at
Stanford University who is advising
the Obama campaign.

Sen. Clinton has endorsed meritpay
plans that reward all school
employees based on improvements
in student achievement in the entire
school. Her idea is modeled
after the plan negotiated by the
New York City public schools and
the United Federation of Teachers.
That union, like its national counterpart,
the AFT, has endorsed Sen.
Clinton.

Sen. Clinton also supports additional
pay for teachers who work in
subjects with a shortage of teachers,
such as science and math, and
in hard-to-staff schools, according
to Ms. Brown, her adviser.

Vol. 27, Issue 25, Pages 1, 21-22

Published in Print: February 27, 2008, as Democrats’ K-12 Views Differ, Subtly

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